Have you guys tried the Poser/obj file import plugins from the link below ?
While not as in depth sounding as Keith Young’s I’ve read elsewhere that they import obj files with materials fairly successfully. The link below has the latest version for C4D 8 but click on the “Old Plugins” link at the bottom of the page for a C4D 7/8 compliant plugin.

Keith,
Thank you for working on this.
Lack of OBJ material import/export has always put a grumble in the belly during my daily C4D work. The addition of UVMapper specific options is also cool (no BP here). Who knows maybe this will get me to dig out my copy of Poser.

…I have the import side of things working now and will add the export code after I get some sleep…

I have the export code in place now as well. As implemented,:

on import, if normals exist in the .obj file, Normal Tags are created for each Polygon Object that has them.

on export, if Normal Tags are found, the normals are exported.

…note that these options only exist in the v8.5 plugin, since v7.3 didn’t have the Normal Tag.

When exporting, if there are no Normal Tags, no normals are written to the file. This shouldn’t be a problem, because most (all?) 3D apps know how to create normals if they are missing (the only time you might NEED to export normals is if they are special/non-standard in some way… in which case, there would likely be Normal Tags present from the previous import).

Thanks Keith, I would like to test this with Zbrush on exporting of models in obj with materials painted and setup in Zbrush to obj.

If this is successful, it would be very helpful, as I prefer to painting models in Zbrush at the moment and then bringing this into C4D for advanced modeling and tweaking of the newly painted materials.

As you can see my avatar was modeled and painted in Zbrush, if it is possible to bring this in as obj with the painted textures intact into C4D that would be a boom!

Kinda wish I knew more about the coding/compiling side of things, but you may not need Codewarrior to compile a Mac version of Riptide. Mac OS X includes developer tools and a compiler for free (!!!) nowadays…

This is kind of a coincedence that this thread has revived itself. I am doing a project where i have 10 seperate letters generated from text->extrude nurbs. I then split the different letters to individual polygon objects. I need to export each object as a single object. Can Riptide do this?

I know that cinema’s .obj exporter will export everything in the scene. I just need to export each single letter as an .obj. Thanks.

if you need help concerning MAC compiling, let me know. Of course, we need to arrange something so it pays for me too (something like 50% of the first two sold plugins or anything would surely do it). But I am sure it then pays for you even more.